It is in your best interest to better respect the Highway Code from now on. A new type of automatic radar will come into action from the beginning of 2024 to detect an offense by examining the interior of your vehicle.
Most motorists fear speed cameras scattered along roads and highways. And rightly so: these devices are capable of detecting speeding and taking photos of offending vehicles day and night, which makes it possible to automatically draw up and send fines to their drivers. It’s hard to escape them! And with advances in electronics and computing, speed is no longer their sole center of attention! Thermal radars will equip certain routes from January 2024! This new technological tool has sensors sensitive to infrared rays that allow it to detect the number of people inside each vehicle, with the aim of determining whether motorists are respecting traffic rules in carpool lanes.
Inaugurated in France at the end of 2020, near Grenoble, the carpooling lanes aim to relieve congestion on the main roads in order to reduce CO2 emissions. They are reserved for vehicles carrying at least two people or benefiting from a Crit’Air 0 sticker – i.e. all electric and hydrogen vehicles, regardless of the number of occupants – but also for emergency vehicles and public transport, to taxis and motorbikes – provided there are two people on them. The problem is that the traffic rules concerning them are still too little respected. This is where thermal radars will come into play.
Thanks to their infrared sensors, they are able to detect the number of passengers on board a vehicle. And it’s impossible to fool them, because they are able to spot “fake” passengers, like a mannequin, for example, and to “see” through tinted windows. If the radar finds only one passenger in a car in the carpool lane, it takes a photo of the license plate, which will then be analyzed by law enforcement, to determine if the driver is in violation or not. If this is the case, he will receive a hefty fine of €135, which can be reduced to €90 if paid within 15 days.
The first thermal radars will come into action in January 2024 in Lyon, on the M6 and M7 axes which cross the metropolis, in both directions of traffic. They should be deployed fairly quickly in other large cities, such as Lille, Strasbourg and, soon, Paris, with the lanes reserved on the ring road for the Olympic Games. But other developments are to be expected with the development of artificial intelligence.
Indeed, the Government wishes to automate part of the process of fining drivers who do not respect these restrictions, and is also on the verge of publishing a decree to this effect. It turns out that several private companies specialize in cameras capable of counting the number of silhouettes in a vehicle, including at very high speeds. The AI-powered cameras will therefore take pictures of the people present, taking care to blur the faces of the passengers – but not that of the driver –, with a whole bunch of data making it possible to characterize the offense (place, date, route and number of occupants) and identify the vehicle (model, registration). The artificial intelligence will be responsible for checking in the various databases whether the vehicle is one of the models authorized to travel on the lane in question. No doubt, the fines are likely to rain down from 2024!